Your Daily Herman Cain Update: The Cainaclysm

Looks like it's a matter of days now, Herb. We've all had our fun, but this latest thing with the lady from Dunwoody, and the preposterous non-denial denial from your lawyer, is the ballgame. You know it. We know it. Your fellow unelectable loons know it. Even Newt knows it, and he also knows that, if you're going to run around on the missus (or, in his case, the missus-es), you've got to step away from the game for a decade until everyone forgets what an unprincipled yutz you are. Even the invisible man has tumbled to it.

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(Also, Herman, your supporters are not helping you out here. Ms. Klein — who will never send a virgin to do a hooker's work, by cracky! — is quite a piece of, ah, work her own self. She once livened up an interview by pointing a loaded pistol at a reporter. Confidentially, Herb, it's a damned good thing you didn't hit on her.)

Here are your basic problems, Herb. You're a rich dilettante who is not Mitt Romney. You're a proud know-nothing who isn't Michele Bachmann. You're a basically inarticulate spokesman who is not Rick Perry. You're a monomaniacal crank who is not Ron Paul. And it looks like you're an adulterer who is not Newt Gingrich. There's just no place left for you on the great carny freak-show that is the Republican primary process. This is a field in which, if you're looking for a rich dilettante, a proud know-nothing, a basically inarticulate spokesman, a monomaniacal crank, or an adulterer, you actually have a decision to make between several of each of them. If you're looking for one of those, you have options. This is rather unprecedented, actually, and a helluva lot of fun. But not for you, Herb. Sorry.

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Should this latest "revelation" matter? Of course not. Your campaign should have been destroyed with "Uzbecky-kecky-stan-stan." It should have folded in on itself the 230th time you repeated "9-9-9" in a single debate. It should have imploded simply because that particular central policy proposal was economic insanity that you got from your barber or some such thing. Your campaign should have been an object of mockery and derision from the moment you filed the papers. The idea that an ancient affair was necessary to eliminate the possibility that you, Herb Cain, could have the slimmest chance of being elected president of the United States is a better measure of the depth of this country's problems than the Consumer Price Index is.

Now, though, it's going to end badly, and it's going to end ugly. That's rather a shame, all things considered. Running for president shouldn't necessarily mean that you accept the possibility of personal, as well as political, destruction. It shouldn't chew up families. It shouldn't rake up old sins or rub raw old wounds. It can't help but inconvenience the ones you love, but it shouldn't hurt them this way. If you were only Newt Gingrich, who left his conscience behind two wives ago, you might actually be able to brazen through this for a while. Now, though, it really is time to leave before the collateral damage gets beyond anyone's ability to repair. You should never be president, Herb. But you shouldn't have to be a public spectacle, either.